


The Sky's Gone Out

by mx_vertiginous



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies)
Genre: Angst and Feels, F/F, Medical Trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-29
Updated: 2018-12-29
Packaged: 2019-07-04 06:21:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 2,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15835545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mx_vertiginous/pseuds/mx_vertiginous
Summary: Serialized BugBorg minific collection.  Takes place in the time gap between GOTG Vol. 2 and Infinity War.Mantis struggles to navigate a world beyond slavery, a world where her empathic abilities belong to no one beyond herself.  Meanwhile, Nebula is finding revenge to be a lonely pursuit; maybe she needs her sister and the Guardians more than she had imagined.When I say minific, I mean MINI.  These are super short fragments, sporadically updated.





	1. Chapter 1

Mechanical fingers tapped in the last coordinates.

Nebula sighed. She didn't like this. Her planned attack on Thanos was taking far more energy than she had initially thought. She should have known better than to charge right in without a plan. The Black Order was alert to her intentions now; she had barely shaken their minions off her tail. And with the damage to her prosthetics, she didn't have a chance of getting past them to the heart of her father.

A few minute adjustments to the dials and she hit the button.

She knew Gamora disapproved. But she also knew Gamora would help. Not taking up arms, of course, but strategy. Or at least an open ear so Nebula could talk out her plans with something other than a dumb console. Leaning on her sister was new, but she needed every resource she could get if she was going to make this count. And, of course, the Guardians currently had a huge ship with a fully stocked repair bay. The work that Kraglin had done on her arm was top notch, better than she had expected. And she hoped she could trust him to help with further repairs. 

_Trust,_ the ship kicked into hyperdrive. _Trust._

The wrong word to blink out on. Nebula shuddered, was she really reduced to trusting a bunch of hothead idiots and Ravager scum?

But her sister was with them. They had the facilities she needed. She didn't have to trust the whole of the crew; and to be sure, she didn't. Rocket and Peter were loose cannons, and that empath they'd picked up from Ego creeped her out. But it was a matter of utility, she needed a safe house. Get in. Get out. Get back to her mission. 

Nebula looked up, the remaining Quadrant of the old Eclector loomed large in her windshield.

She would have to trust them.


	2. In Lieu of Sleep

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Our Bug-friend is not having a good time.

Space unrolled endlessly outside the porthole. Mantis had known the universe extended infinitely in every direction but she had never understood quite how vast it could be. She spent hours here, in lieu of impossible sleep, her eyes gently slipping from one cloudybright nebula to the next. 

Out from under Ego’s thumb, life had not been as easy as she had hoped. The Guardians and remaining crew of the Eclector Quadrant had been kind enough, but she couldn’t shake the sinking feeling that she was useless to them. Dead weight. And she couldn’t untangle their emotions in a way that ever made her feel secure. With Ego, she had a lodestar; if she simply followed his moods and adapted to him, she could survive. Here passions were high, emotions volatile, allegiances shifting, and there were so, so many people to keep track of. 

People who didn’t want her to touch them.

People who wanted to use her against other people.

People who wanted to command her empathy as if she was still a slave.

And any one of them could turn on her at a moment’s notice. She had seen, in Ego, what that might mean. She had no doubt that any one of them might quietly push her out an airlock if she crossed them. 

Aside from possibly Drax. She could trust Drax. Maybe. 

Off in the distance, one of the nebulas shifted and bent, the sign of a hyperspace jump. Mantis leaned her head against the glass. Surely a ship would approach, a ship bearing yet another person for her navigate. To placate. 

It was exhausting. For the first time Mantis had an emotion she could call her own. She was exhausted.


	3. The Return

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> No one pushes your buttons like your sister.

Gamora’s voice crackled over the com, “Hang on, let me get the doors. Damn it… this fucking…. OK… that should do it.” The docking bay doors yawned open and Nebula darted her ship over the threshold, before they slammed down again behind her.

“Sorry sis,” Gamora said as Nebula disembarked, “We’re in stealth mode. The Sovereigns are still after Rocket. Thieving little bastard.”

Nebula frowned, hopping to the grimy floor of the empty cargo bay. “I would have thought you guys would have ditched this old hulk for something a little more nimble.”

“It has it’s uses. Ravager cloaking technology is well-nigh uncrackable, but yeah…. We’re going to have to dump it at some point.” Gamora fixed her with a hard look. “You’re back?”

Shame bloomed in the root of Nebula’s stomach. Maybe Gamora hadn’t meant it like that, but the knife twisted nonetheless. This had been a mistake. She should have just died fighting her way through the Black Order. Even if she had never placed a hand on her father, it would have been more noble than running back to her sister with her tail between her legs. 

“Yeah, I know…. In my place, you would have killed him already.”

Her sister reached out a hand and touched her softly on the shoulder. “I’m glad you’re here, how can I help?”


	4. Some people you just can't touch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Does Nebula count as one of the Guardians yet? Because damn if she doesn't keep popping in unexpectedly.

The sound of bickering echoed down the hallway and carried to the bridge.

“Who the hell is she arguing with now?” Rocket grumbled.

Peter had wedged himself under the console, trying to repair a glitch in the nav system. “Arguing? Who… Mantis never… Oh.” Gamora’s voice rang out clearly from the doorway. “Yeah, I forgot to tell you, she gave Nebula our coordinates. Something about the Black Order.”

Rocket slammed a paw to his forehead. “We’re already running from the damn Sovereigns and she invites a serial killer on board? Gamora, what the fuck were you thinking?”

Thanos’ daughters paused in the doorway.

“She had nowhere else to go, what was I supposed to do, leave her to die? She’s my sister.”

* * *

Mantis placed a hand softly on Drax’s elbow, and was reassured that he wasn’t alarmed. She wasn’t quite sure why Rocket was so angry, Nebula had helped save them on Ego. But Rocket seemed to be cranky about everything, and she was starting to learn that they had a lot more to fear when he wasn’t complaining.

Nebula hung back in the shadow of the doorway, her posture stiff with apprehension. Her clothes were stained with dark marks; blood or grease, Mantis couldn’t quite tell. A few wires hung loose where her robotic pinkie had been. She couldn’t help but wonder what the other guy looked like. Thanos? Had Nebula gotten to her father? She must have. Mantis couldn’t imagine that she would return in defeat. From what little she knew of Nebula, the cyborg would rather have died trying. But the way she stood, the tone in Gamora’s voice, they conveyed anything but victory.

Body language, tone of voice, it felt to Mantis like such feeble shorthand. She was so tempted to reach out, place her hand on Nebula’s hand, to _feel_ the whole of her story. 

But Mantis was quickly learning that there were some people she could never touch.


	5. Gold Plated Assholes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A few choice words from our foulmouthed Trash Panda.

In the distance, the stars twisted and warped. Like popcorn in a hot pan, tiny gold ships appeared one by one on the horizon.

Peter Quill poked his head out from under the navigation console. “Hey guys? Can someone take a look at the display? I’m getting some weird sensor readings down here, and I can’t tell if it’s a short fuse or what.”

“Hooooly shit.” Rocket’s voice was long and low as he looked out the windscreen at impending doom. “That’s not a short. Quill get the nav back online immediately, I don’t care if it’s buggy, as long as it finds us a jump point We gotta get the hell out of here.”

Kraglin pushed past Nebula onto the bridge as klaxons blared. “I don’t know how they found us, but they’re within the cloaking perimeter.”

“Oh I know how they found us,” Rocket growled, glaring back at Gamora “a certain soft hearted Zehoberei gave us away. Hold tight, guys, I’m gonna get us out of here.”

The navigation projection flickered to life across the panoramic windshield. Clouds of Sovereign fighters were advancing on them from all directions. They were starting to coalesce into a formation that would leave the bulky Eclector with no room to maneuver. Rocket quickly snapped the ship into a dive sending bodies flying around the bridge. “Quill, we need the hyperdrive. And I hope like hell that jump point is where I think it is” 

Peter struggled out from under the console and hopped into the co-pilot seat. He fumbled to secure his seat harness with one hand while pulling up coordinates with the other. “I’m on it. But with the nav glitching, I can’t make any promises where we’re going.”

Rocket threw up his paws in frustration. “I don’t care where we go, we'll jump as far as we can. Just as long as those gold plated assholes can’t find us.” He tapped in a few more commands and the universe bubbled and twisted around them.


	6. Brace yourself

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Nebula makes a critical mistake.

As the glimmering ships sparked into existence on the horizon, the change in mood on the bridge was palpable. Rocket's voice shifted, Gamora's posture stiffened, Drax leaned forward with interest ad even baby Groot twisted to attention. Bits and pieces of emotional cues swirled around Mantis like a maelstrom. Only Nebula in the doorway stood impassive, as if none of this had any chance of affecting her.

Mantis didn't understand the context for the shift, she'd never seen these gold ships before, but the whole of the Guardians seemed to take them seriously. She reached for Drax's shoulder, looking for reassurance, or maybe a feeling that would make sense of it all... or perhaps just to steady herself. But barely a second before her hand made contact, Rocket threw the ship into a dive. Mantis went stumbling across the bridge, slamming her head into a console and sprawling out on the grimy floor.

The voice on the bridge seemed to garble and run together as Mantis struggled to sit up. She ran a hand over her forehead, and down her temple, no blood but the flesh was tender; no doubt it would be bruised and purple by tomorrow. Her head felt lopsided and she could feel her right antenna sagging.

Suddenly, a purple hand appeared in front of her. Nebula's voice was terse, "Get up. Brace yourself, we're getting out of here."

Mantis reached out to take Nebula's hand. Her fingers touched purple flesh and all she could feel of the cyborg was pain, a million nerves sizzling against hard metal circuitry.

Without thinking, she shared up at Nebula wide-eyed, "You hurt," she said softly.

Nebula looked down at her with a curious expression; in an instant the world around both of them twisted and pulled like taffy as the Eclector hit the jump point and lurched out of the Sovereign trap.


	7. The truth of her

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Guardians get lost and Mantis learns some things.

Temporal reality twisted in on itself and collapsed. The universe seems to pause. And then, in an instant, the ship and it’s inhabitants popped back into reality, lightyears away from the Sovereign fleet. The cacaphony of alarms and klaxons immediately died off. 

In the resulting silence, Kraglin and Rocket spoke at nearly the same time…

“I’ll go restore…”  
“Where the…”  
“… the cloaking.”  
“…. Hell are we?”

Kraglin hurried off the bridge, as Peter ventured an answer to Rocket’s question.

“Fuck if I know.”

* * *

In a corner of the bridge, Nebula pulled Mantis to her feet. 

The dizzying hyperjump had only amplified the secondhand sensations that Mantis had absorbed from the cyborg. As space folded in on itself, her own senses melted into the metallic sizzle of mechanical nerves. Overwhelmed and overcome, she collapsed against a wall, her antennae sagging with exhaustion.

“Are you OK?” Nebula’s voice was dry and hard.

Mantis looked up at her, “Pain. You’re in so much pain.”

A strange look flitted across Nebula’s face, her stance stiffened. “Fuck you.”

Nebula turned sharply and stalked off the bridge. Mantis, overcome, crumpled back onto the floor. She had no context for making sense of what Nebula felt like; she had never felt any single emotion so intensely off anyone else before. Others might see the cyborg as a bundle of rage, or cold sadism, but Mantis could feel the truth of her.

And that truth was sheer, unalloyed pain.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Forgive any typos, this is my first time authoring and posting something direct from my phone. Let me know if there are any glaring errors.


	8. The last bastion of privacy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Regrets. Nebula has them.

The head. The last bastion of privacy on any ship.

Slamming the door, Nebula pounded the wall with her live fist. Fuck! 

Nebula started to sink to the ground, but caught sight of the gooey floor and cursed the Ravager’s idea of hygiene. Instead she flipped closed the toilet and sat, staring at her reflection in the scratched and filthy mirror. Her eyes traced the planes that transected her face, each one a mark of a fight lost, of another repair, another upgrade that might finally fix her defects as a warrior.

Every surgery was seared into her memory. But as she studied the circuitry wrapping around her skull, Nebula recalled the ocular upgrades as particularly painful. They had needed her partially awake for those, asking her to focus the bionic eyes, tinkering with the circuitry in her meat-brain and asking her to focus again. Until, suddenly, the harsh light above the surgery chair snapped into sizzling high definition. 

It was second nature now, she could blur out the focus on her face and see every little particle of ravager grime on the mirror for what it was. 

They had gone into her brain and made her into this. And when she left Thanos’ side, she had sworn to herself that no one would ever meddle in her brain again. 

And yet, she’d reached out her own hand and given that idiotic bug a front row seat to her own personal shit-show. She’d let someone else in, for no good reason except to help them. 

The cauterized ducts in her right eye tingled. They did that sometimes.


	9. Lost in Space

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Well, Rocket and Peter have fucked up the nav system escaping from the Sovereign, so now everybody is just stuck. And Nebula, for one, is trying to stave off cabin fever.

“Why are you always watching me like that?” Nebula demanded, not looking up from the delicate nano soldering work on her replacement hand.

Mantis thought over this for a moment. The rest of the crew slept, with the exception of Rocket who was tinkering with the nav in hopes of finding their way to someplace in the known universe. Drax had dropped off hours ago. Even Kraglin snored lightly in the hammock he had strung across a corner of the repair bay.

“Nothing else to do, I guess.”

“You could go stare out a window or something. It’s weird being looked at.”

“I’m sorry,” Mantis replied simply. She did not move from the doorway.

They had had this same discussion ten or so times. Mantis had tried to keep her distance from Nebula, but she was drawn to watch her like a moth to a flame. When no one else wanted something from her, when even Drax’s goofy stories wore thin, Mantis found herself watching Nebula. Again and again.

There was not much else to do when you were lost in space.

“You seem to always have repairs to make.” She ventured small talk once again.

“Hmph… there’s a lot to repair to get this junk working. And I don’t…” Nebula paused, “I don’t have my father’s army of technicians out here. All I’ve got is myself. And too much time.” She reflected again on the fact that her father’s army knew more about her weaknesses than she knew about repairing herself. It was a thought she tried to shoo out of her mind. But in the long drift through parts unknown, it had come to haunt her. 

“You’re worried?”

Nebula snorted, “You don’t have to be an empath to tell that. We all are. And I’m no use with the nav, so,” she shrugged, “I might as well fix myself.”

Mantis nodded. She wished, in vain, that she could fix herself as easily as laying parts out on a workbench.

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry for the delay friends. Life has crashed over me like a tsunami. But bit-by-bit this story will eventually get told.


End file.
